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Barbed Wire

Lousy Media Coverage? Blame Candidates Too

Craig will be talking about this topic on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz (Sunday, 11 AM ET)

Let the news media handwringing begin. It’s another predictable scene in our presidential campaign soap opera. Why didn’t we cover more issues? How could we chase so many silly stories? Too much horse race reporting. Obsession with polls. And so on.

All legitimate concerns that we ask at the end of every campaign, but nothing much changes.

While the news media takes its ritual beating don’t let the candidates off the hook. This time around I’d even say the campaigns bear most of the blame.

Neither side wanted to talk specifics about much of anything. Distraction was the name of this game. Obama had a lousy first debate and his aides drove Big Bird to the stage. Romney has no plan of his own for the Middle East and stirs up the phony debate about security personnel at the Benghazi consulate.

Nearly every news cycle for months you can find tweets, YouTube ads and one-liners directly from the campaigns designed to ridicule and distract. Spokespeople are put forward daily to spin every nuance of the polls, but ask for the actual numbers behind Mitt Romney’s tax-and-spending rhetoric or President Obama’s next jobs plan and you get canned non-answers.

And maybe a billion dollars spent on TV ads mostly aimed at personally destroying the opponent.

Forget trying to press the candidates themselves on the issues. They spent way more time repeating vapid stump speeches to supporters and talking about nothing on fluffy talk shows than taking serious questions from serious journalists.

For sure, blame the media for taking the bait without fail. But don’t forget it was the only “substance” these campaigns put out there.

coverage… what coverage? there has to be something there to consider it even unlousy.

media… what media? it doesn’t even qualify as entertainment*

lousy, yes.

*example was cnn noontime segment with giggly news?lady and her 2 giggly lawyer guests all halloween costumed saying nothing for 5 minutes…just giggling at themselves and each other. ted turner, what have they done to your baby?

COME ON MEDIA!
Romney’s Father George Romney, Gov of Michigan released TWELVE YEARS of his tax returns, as have President Obama and VP Biden! Romney releases ONE YEAR! What a joke…I don’t think he broke the law, but his returns would show that he paid ZERO US taxes some years while paying more taxes in Switzerland and the Caymans on his overseas bank accounts.

News is a business. The major media corporations’ political “news” coverage is worthless. The best reporting is on the web. I find dailykos blog to be the best source of political news & and analysis. I recommend it to all trailmix readers.

dailkos is still small enough not to be corrupted, as huffington post seems to be these days.

“Huffpo” used to be good, but now they’ve gone “corporate,” slick and and shallow.

Well I called ABC News twice and left my name and number on two voice mails and once with someone I spoke with about the voter registration fraud issue. I have yet to hear back from them about this.

It seems that the main street media is not interested in fair elections.

Nor has President Obama’s Campaign gotten back in touch with me to let me know if that person who was registered at my address was a attempt to dis-enfranchise that person so they would not be enabled to vote or just a fraudulent registration.

There are still many touch screen machines that do not have a paper trail and I am really concerned that this election will be stolen.

A word about Sandy --
The European model has nailed the forecast from the beginning . It is now predicting a pressure reading at landfall of 949 millibars. The all time lows in this area, are around 961.

“Sandy to feed off near-record warm waters off the mid-Atlantic coast

During September 2012, ocean temperatures off the mid-Atlantic coast in the 5×10° latitude-longitude box between 35 – 40°N, 65 – 75° W were 2.3°F (1.3°C) above average, according to the UK Met Office. This is the 2nd greatest departure from average for ocean temperatures in this region since reliable ocean temperature measurements began over a century ago (all-time record: 2.0°C above average in September 1947.) These unusually warm waters have persisted into October, and will enable Sandy to pull more energy from the ocean than a typical October hurricane. The warm waters will also help increase Sandy’s rains, since more water vapor will evaporate into the air from a warm ocean. I expect Sandy will dump the heaviest October rains on record over a large swath of the mid-Atlantic and New England”

Ohio Is Not a Toss Up
Nate Silver looks at the polling average in Ohio — made up of roughly a dozen polling firms who have surveyed the state over the past 10 days — and notes it shows President Obama with a 2.4 percentage point lead over Mitt Romney.

“There are no precedents in the database for a candidate losing with a two- or three-point lead in a state when the polling volume was that rich… It is misinformed to refer to Ohio as a toss-up. Mr. Obama is the favorite there, and because of Ohio’s central position in the Electoral College, he is therefore the overall favorite in the election.”

Media enablers is correct. Ohio is a toss up only because the MSM need and want for it to be one. They of course lie only slightly less than Mitt.

Go Giants
I bought a bunch of “must use immediately raspberries” at the market.

We are watching the Giants beat the Tigers (so far)
and my drink of choice is — a couple of handfuls of raspberries, some ice, some sugar some vodka blenderize

As far as the media — trying to blame the campaigns --not happening.

What Jace said

And it’s hardly the campaigns fault when the media hops on some bullsh-t idea that benefits them to cover it it the mythology that has grown up around the Obama debate performance kind of like the Dean Scream, Al Gore inventing the internet etc…all media inventions to the detriment of the victims

Sandy danced off to the East as she passed by you Sturg. And you live in the that wonderful bend in the coastline , that makes a lot of difference.

What is freaking out all the people who watch this stuff for a living is this :
We have a hurricane with a “Northeaster” wrapping itself around it. When it gets to Delaware, it’s gonna make a nearly 90 degree turn to the West . In the Northern Hemisphere when things move West in the atmosphere……… It’s always a bad thing, and very rare.

And Sandy is re-writing the record books, and all the ink is still to come.

The wind field that can break tree limbs over you car , will be 1,000 miles wide. And it will take days to move North into Canada.

The model says 949 millibars at the coast . Philly will set a new all time record for low pressure. By 10 millibars maybe. A huge drop on this scale. 1014 millibars is normal sea level , 993, you got yourself a tropical cyclone. As low pressure goes, to see these numbers is very scary .
Sandy is gonna bleach a lot hair when we total up all the numbers.

with potential catastrophes on both shores, perhaps it would be better for the prez and the press to suspend campaigning and concentrate on the citizenry. at least it would show more compassion than shrub did with katrina.

After the warning was posted by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Gov. Neil Abercrombie declared an emergency and officials began evacuating coastal and low-lying areas, KITV News in Honolulu reported.

The first small tsunami waves were seen off Hawaii about six hours after the earthquake, CNN said.

Good Job Craig — it was almost the beginning of the conversation we all need to have about what is the current role of the media

All those journo school rule books have been tossed

Why do reporters let campaigns set the tone for coverage.

Don’t get me wrong — on balance I think Democrats and Democratic candidates get the short end of the stick
always

Howie calling parts of the reporting the clown campaign when he is the biggest bozo was a nice trip to the irony board.

Rmoney set the tone and clowns like Howie just h opped into the clown car. Rmoney said he wasn’t releasing his tax returns because it would give his opponents too much ammunition — yet I have yet to hear Howie castigate the media for dropping the issue